PROJECT OUTREACH

By Melissa Olson Cunningham

At Michigan, close to 5,000 students volunteer each year. Many of them through courses that provide academic credit for volunteering. "Project Outreach/Psych 211" is one such course, and it sends 400 to 600 students into different community sites each semester.

Begun by the Department of Psychology in 1967, the course is intended "to help students understand the larger framework of their field experience," says Jerome Miller, faculty coordinator for the project and director of U-M's Center for the Child and the Family. "In the process, they are doing a lot of community service, approximately 40,000 hours of community service a year to be exact."

Project Outreach has 75 placement sites, all nonprofit organizations. Rob Steiner '96 of Grand Rapids, Michigan, volunteers at a juvenile detention center through the course. Steiner says Project Outreach has made him more involved in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area and community" and put him more in touch with social conditions across America.

His volunteer work is not easy, he says, because "no matter how hard you try to understand the teenager's plight or justify it, you can't. It's impossible. The best you can do is observe, understand and pass on your knowledge"

Another Project Outreach site is the U-M's Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor. Mott's volunteer program began in the 1940s and by 1969 had 60 volunteers. That number has increased to more than a thousand aged 14 to 90, over half of whom are U-M students.